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April
26
2023

“Kill the Whales!”
James Rickards

On Friday Joe Biden signed an executive order directing every federal agency to work toward “environmental justice for all.”

The executive order even establishes a new Office of Environmental Justice within the White House.

If that sounds kind of Orwellian, there’s a reason for that — it is.

“It’s only about the future of our planet,” Biden said.

If “the future of our planet” is on the line, then you can justify whatever extreme measure you want to enact.

After all, you don’t ask questions during an emergency. You act. And what bigger emergency is there than the planet’s very future?

It frames the issue in such a way that’s designed to nullify any criticism or serious analysis. You’re either with the planet or against it.

Beneath a large component of this campaign is the so-called climate emergency.

There’s only one problem — there is no climate emergency. It’s a myth whipped up by radicals to terrify people into supporting extreme policies no one would otherwise embrace.

Some climate activists have even conceded that they’ve had to exaggerate the threat in order to frighten people into taking action.

In other words, they admit that they’ve been engaging in propaganda. Unfortunately, it’s worked to a frightening degree.

They’ve Got It Backward

Here are the facts: There was a slight warming trend from 1985 to around 2005, although there’s nothing unusual about that. Since 2005, there has been a slight cooling trend but, again, that’s not unusual.

These warming and cooling trends are caused by solar cycles, ocean currents and volcanic activity. These large and complex forces can create induction zones where warm saltier water moves under colder less saline water to change surface temperatures, which in turn affect temperatures at lower latitudes as cold Arctic water moves further south.

None of this has anything to do with CO2 levels, which have never been shown to have any measurable impact on climate. In fact, the evidence strongly indicates that periods of high CO2 concentrations followed warming periods. In other words, higher CO2 concentrations were not the cause of warm periods, but the result of them.

So the CO2 alarmists have it all backward.

Again, all of these changes I described above are normal. In fact, much more extreme changes such as the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warming Period have been proved to have occurred centuries before any industrial or manmade output of CO2 or methane.

The bottom line is CO2 is a trace gas with little or no provable effect on climate. But that doesn’t matter to the climate change cult. And that’s really what it is — a cult.

Do you think I’m exaggerating? Well, Time magazine just published an article called “The Case for Making Earth Day a Religious Holiday.” So there you go.

These people are either incredibly stupid, incredibly deluded or incredibly naive. Most are probably a combination of all three.

Does This Make Sense?

These green cultists claim that wind turbines, solar modules and electric vehicles (EVs) will provide a non-carbon-based sustainable alternative to oil and gas. But that’s demonstrably proveable nonsense.

If you have an EV, the vast majority of its electric charge comes from oil, gas and coal-burning plants. So there’s no reduction in carbon emissions. All you’re doing is shifting the emissions from the engine to the electricity plant, but the emissions are the same.

(Never mind the waiting time at charging stations, which can be hours even for 30-minute charges because there’s a line of cars ahead of you.)

That’s just a fact. And if everyone were driving electric cars like the cultists want, it would overwhelm the energy grid, leaving everyone in the dark without power. For some of these cultists at least, that’s probably a feature, not a bug.

Meanwhile, the chemicals needed for batteries include lithium, cobalt, copper, nickel and more. The energy and water needed to mine those chemicals are greater than the electricity saved by the finished product.

Not to mention the poisonous byproducts and the fact that all of the lithium in the world won’t be enough to manufacture more than a small portion of the batteries needed to power the cars envisioned with batteries.

The list of non-feasible, non-economic and highly polluting aspects of the “green” revolution in power sources goes on. The whole thing is a scam driven by greed — think of those corporate solar panel and windmill producers — ideology and a hidden agenda of transferring wealth from rich to poor countries without any input from voters and citizens.

The Green Cult’s True Legacy

What has it actually produced, besides things like blighting land- and seascapes with huge stretches of ugly wind turbines? Here’s the answer:

Actual environmental destruction. These wind turbines have killed massive numbers of whales, porpoises and birds. This is from a New York Post article following Earth Day:

“As the Biden administration is literally permitting the offshore wind industry to kill endangered whales under the guise of ‘saving the planet,’ Earth Day has gone 180 degrees from where it started and has become truly Orwellian,” [Steve Milloy, a senior fellow at the Energy and Environment Legal Institute] said…

“It’s gone from ‘Save the Whales’ to ‘Kill the Whales.’ And the green groups that have promoted Earth Day for 53 years are totally OK with this agenda”…

Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow president Craig Rucker said the push to build the wind farms comes “despite growing evidence that whales are being impacted by the preliminary sonar blasting being conducted to site windmills, as well as scores of the marine mammals washing up dead on beaches.”

“’Damn the whales, full speed ahead’ seems to be the official policy of the Biden administration when it comes to the construction of offshore wind,” Rucker said in a statement. “The White House seems to remain unfazed and fixated on implementing its reckless ‘net zero’ energy agenda”…

The noise produced from building the farms, especially pile-driving the turbines into the ocean floor, has been shown to affect aquatic life, according to federal regulators, who implemented a “soft start” approach before construction to drive away species.

The ProPublica report states that in the next 10 years, more than 3,000 turbines will be built and nearly 10,000 miles of cable will be laid on 2.4 million acres of the ocean managed by the federal government.

The construction would involve scores of ships traveling at high speeds and crisscrossing known whale habitats, increasing the chances of marine mammals being fatally struck…

“This alarming number of deaths is unprecedented in the last half-century, the only unique factor from previous years, is the excessive scope, scale, and magnitude of offshore wind powerplant activity in the region,” the environmental conservation group said in a statement.

Yet the green cult claims to be environmentalists. What a joke. They’re cultists whose true legacy is scores of dead whales and other creatures. Can it be stopped? Maybe — there is hope.

The Green Cult’s “Jumped the Shark”

The lies and fake science coming from the climate cult is non-stop. Each report has more dubious assumptions and flawed models than the one before. It would be nice to think we could stop fighting the climate cult because they are making such fools of themselves that the Green New Scam will fall of its own weight.

Now, after decades of bad science, the climate cult has finally “jumped the shark,” as the saying goes. They’ve gone too far.

A new report claims that there is a definite causal relationship between global warming and the number of home runs hit in Major League Baseball. That’s right.

Never mind that the correlation does not hold in AAA ball, NCAA ball, or the Japanese major leagues. Never mind that home run seasons often come in streaks and there may just be more home run hitters around. What about the fact that annual home run production since 2016 is 5,800 with a huge standard deviation of 500 home runs?

The truth is, this “scientific” paper is junk science as is the entire phony climate change hysteria. It took a while but the climate cult crowd may have finally jumped the shark.

The Green New Scam will fail sooner than later. In the meantime, we’ll just have to put up with the latest elite fantasies.

Let’s just hope we can limit the damage they do to the rest of us. We know whose side the whales are on.

 

James G. Rickards is the editor of Strategic Intelligence. He is an American lawyer, economist, and investment banker with 35 years of experience working in capital markets on Wall Street. He was the principal negotiator of the rescue of Long-Term Capital Management L.P. (LTCM) by the U.S Federal Reserve in 1998. His clients include institutional investors and government directorates. His work is regularly featured in the Financial Times, Evening Standard, New York Times, The Telegraph, and Washington Post, and he is frequently a guest on BBC, RTE Irish National Radio, CNN, NPR, CSPAN, CNBC, Bloomberg, Fox, and The Wall Street Journal. He has contributed as an advisor on capital markets to the U.S. intelligence community, and at the Office of the Secretary of Defense in the Pentagon. Rickards is the author of The New Case for Gold (April 2016), and three New York Times best sellers, The Death of Money (2014), Currency Wars (2011), The Road to Ruin (2016) from Penguin Random House.

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